Now President of West Germany, he was a 19-year-old private with the Ninth Infantry Regiment in Potsdam when war came. In 1949, Von Weizsacker's father was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in jail; his sentence was commuted in 1951.
We knew nothing of the secret protocol between Hitler and Stalin that contained provisions for the attack on Poland. German newspapers were full of reports of Polish violence and provocations against the German minority. Who knew whether the reports were correct? Most were believed.
Despite the influence of Hitler's propaganda on German public opinion, there was...